


Another Cowl

by Lavanya_Six



Category: Worm (Web Serial Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen, I'm Batman, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:44:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavanya_Six/pseuds/Lavanya_Six
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of one-shot crossovers, each unrelated to the others. </p>
<p>Various Brockton Bay regulars get fused with Batman villains.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Atypical Response

The Undersiders stood victorious over the shivering, piss-soaked Lung.

Well, Alec did.

The rest of his teammates had collapsed like the now-shrinking dragon man. Rachel had tucked herself into a tight ball, whimpering alongside her dogs. Lisa was sobbing quietly in the fetal position. Brian had hidden himself in a patch of darkness, possibly to preserve the last vestiges of his manhood. Balling into your knees over some girlfriend? He'd give his friend so much shit over that Aisha chick once he sobered up.

Still, a technical victory over Lung was still a victory, even if none of them had delivered the knockout blow.

Alec gave a thumbs up to the cape skulking in a nearby alleyway. "Nice shooting, Tex."

"...um... "

"You did mean to douse all of us with that fear gas grenade, right?"

It was only a guess, but it fit what his friends were all blubbering about. Although Tattletale was chanting about a 'Rex' or something weird like that. Weird. Maybe she was afraid of dinosaurs?

"The formula is multipur... sure. Fear gas. Let's go with that."

Needling tinkers always greased their gears. The newcomer stepped out of the shadows, revealing her bitching costume: she was tall, spindly, and dressed like a raggedy scarecrow who'd walked out of some farmer's field, if scarecrows also wore a hangman's noose. Not the smartest thing to wear to a fist fight but holy shit. 

"How, uh, are you still coherent?" asked the lady scarecrow. "This activates on contact with skin. Even a gas mask shouldn't stop it. Your mask doesn't even have lens to protect your eyes!"

Alec scratched his stomach. "I _do_ feel a bit tingly."

"That... you should at the very least be having auditory hallucinations. How the hell aren't you having any emotional response?!"

He shrugged. "That the only tinker toy you brought? The fear gas?"

"Er..."

"I'm betting it is." He advanced on her casually, chuckling. Alec wasn't much for slugging it out, but tinkers without their tech advantage were easy-peasy to take down. "Guess this is game, set, match for the Under—"

And that's when scarecrow lady doused his lens-less mask with pepper spray.


	2. Family Man

It wasn't easy, being a black tinker in Brockton Bay.

Normally, anyone and everyone was on the prowl to snap up tinkers. The Protectorate. Corporations. Gangs. It even made sense to throw in your allegiances with a bigger group. Have a crew to watch your back, and a boss to pay for the frankly insane start-up costs every tinker had to deal with.

Except the government and business had pesky things like oversight, and qualms about human experimentation. 

So, Brian turned to crime to support his sister.

While the Azn Bad Boys and Empire Eighty-Eight didn't agree on much, both were united in their opinion about people who weren't the same color as them. Coil's outfit only employed non-parahumans. The Merchants were alone in being equal opportunity, but they were bottom-feeding scum who made the Neo-Nazis look classy.

Still. There'd been more than a few long, sleepless nights where Brian had grappled with the temptation of approaching Skidmark for work. Because it'd mean quick cash, and money was life to Aisha.

He'd never given in. Drug dealing fucks like the Merchants and their deadbeat clients were why Aisha had spent the last two years on life support. 

Instead, he'd hauled his ass all over the northeast. Brian had done gigs in Hartford, Bridgeport, Worcester, Boston, and even as far away as New York City. Each gig was a nerve-wracking day trip away from Aisha. Each another reminder that he couldn't sign up for respectable, well-paying hometown mercenary work with Faultline's Crew. Their missions might take him away from Brockton Bay for weeks on end, and he didn't trust his laboratory to run for that long without him.

Because his own lab was, in Brian's opinion, a piece of shit.

There had never been enough money. He'd had to skate by on outdated lab equipment stolen from the city's university, or from rusted machine parts salvaged from abandoned factories in the Docks. 

Junk, all of it. 

Brian could see, in his mind's eye, the designs for what he need to really help Aisha, and for years he'd had to settle for jury-rigged improvisations. Half his gigs had been paid in lab equipment rather than cash, and that still hadn't been enough. It'd been a constant struggle just to keep her cryogenics chamber functional. He'd been forced to cut every corner he could, for her.

Brian had understood perfectly well what he'd been exposing himself to over the years, working on cryo-tech without the budget for proper safety equipment. The unnatural pallor that had settled into his dark chocolate skin, turning him corpse-like grey. The increased sensitivity to sunlight and heat. The hair loss leading to baldness. The deeper physiological changes....

Panacea might not have been able to treat Aisha's neurological damage, but a touch of his own hand probably would've made the freckled healer shriek in fright. 

And he'd do it all to himself again in a heartbeat.

To never again walk down the Boardwalk on a summer's day with the hot wind in his face? That was a small price to pay for Aisha's life.

The cape press called him _Mister Freeze._

As if Brian's heart was made of ice.


	3. The Only Winning Move

"Think of it as a game," Lisa said. "Bread and circus designed to lull the masses into submission."

"You mean," I ventured, already regretting my choice of icebreaker question, about why captured villains didn't get their secret identities revealed, "like gladiator fights, or like feeding people to lions?"

"Both. Most of the time it's the former. Nobody buys baby doll tees with some hotshot police sergeant's face on it, right? So why do it just because a cop calls himself Armsmaster and runs around with medieval weaponry? It doesn't make sense!"

I motioned for Lisa to keep her voice down. The Forsberg Gallery might've been across the street and several stories down, but Empire Eighty-Eight was holding a fancy ball over there. Who knew if any of their members had super-senses as a card up their sleeve, or if they had discreet spotters on the roof. Lisa thought she was pretty smart but she was just a tinker, not a thinker.

My partner continued, discretely, "Not unless superheroes exist primarily for propaganda purposes instead of law enforcement."

I simply nodded my head.

"I mean, it's better than any local or national sports team because the action isn't confined to an arena. Anyone can play. It allows an easier dissemination of photographs and footage because there's no contracts to lock down copyrights. Cape fights make great media. Even better," Lisa paused, finally taking a breath, "it distracts from the water crisis, foreign entanglements, and the ongoing assault against our civil liberties."

For a moment, I feared another digression about how Dragon couldn't possibly be a single tinker, but was instead either a collective operating under a single moniker or possibly even an AI. Lisa had subjected me to a ten minute lecture about why I was ahead of the curve about never carrying a cell phone with me.

I felt trepidation about what would happen once she realized I didn't have a Facebook account either, although another hug might be nice even if Lisa was a villain.

Part of me wasn't looking forward to turning her over to Armsmaster, once we'd wrapped up our 'duoship' of attacking the villains in their places of power. At least by her side I could divert her from targeting the government or heroes—that debacle at the bank aside.

"What about the psychos and the monsters?" I asked, directing my flying insects to carry a zip line across the street to the gallery roof. "I doubt the Endbringers are in it for royalties."

"Nah. The crazies are in it for themselves, because they're cracked up somehow. Cauldron tolerates their existence because they're perfect for checking any public dissent. Good little parahumans join up with the PRT and fight the big bad monsters... and never mind that Eidolon could mop up the Jack Slashes and Heartbreakers of the world with one hand tied behind his back. Any innocent victims are just useful martyrs to feed the lions."

"Cauldron?"

Lisa looked at me as if I asked why the kitchen tap had hot _and_ cold running water. "...Case 53s? Amnesiacs with bar codes branded into their flesh? Ringing any bells? Ooof. Okay. Well, that's a WHOLE other conversation."

I could guess. "So Cauldron's a government conspiracy."

"No no no. Not the government. The people who pull the government's strings." Lisa raised a finger before I even had a chance to reply. "Just compare the skull shapes of the PRT's Chief Director and Alexandria and your jaw will hit the floor."

"If you say so. What about the Endbringers?"

Lisa tensed a little, maybe because even with her quirks it was still morbid to bring up the Endbringers in casual conversation, but she refrained from an explosive response. "Dunno."

It took me several seconds to gather my wits in the face of that. "You don't know?"

"Not everything is a conspiracy," Lisa insisted, seemingly without irony. "Although it's interesting, isn't it, how the PRT keeps pushing the hero/villain dynamic instead of militarizing in the face of the Endbringers? Has me wondering if there's something inherent in superpowers that makes large-scale cooperation hard. Maybe the hero and villain schtick is just as much about keeping capes sedate as it is the public."

There was the seed of a deeply uncomfortable idea there, one I simply didn't have the head space to deal with right now. Here we were, kitted out with Lisa's tinker tech, about to crash a Neo-Nazi gala party. The two of us against a dozen plus murderous capes.

Yeah. I could totally claim there was a sane partner in this duo.

"Line's set," I said. "Ready?"

Lisa vulpine grin had a manic edge to it. "It means a lot that you're coming, Skitter."

I hooked my harness onto the zip line. "Glad to be here."

"Most people think I'm some tin-foil hat wearing loon -- damn jackbooted PHO mods \-- but it doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Society's crumbling. Just look at this city. We're drowning in a quagmire of celebrity endorsements, government-approved merchandise, and outdated ideologies all given the veneer of respectability thanks to the big lie that's capedom. All so we ignore the real problems facing us."

Lisa took a detonator out of her pocket. True to form, it was capped by a big red bottom.

"Our society is sick and impossible to reform. There's only one sane solution."

With a single click, the micro-bombs my bugs had planted around the gallery—well away from any people—exploded, flooding the ballroom with smoke and flashbangs. Both of us jumped off the roof and slid down the line toward the hole in the freshly shattered skylight.

Lisa's battlecry filled the night: "BLOW IT ALL UP!!"


	4. Rebirth

The Wards had meant something, once.

Letting kids be kids—that'd count as a radical notion in the modern world. Maybe he should have seen it coming the day Behemoth attacked New York City. The Wards had stepped up to hold the line alongside him and his friends, and been hailed as true heroes for it. No PR spin required. But it'd set a precedent, and over time the PRT's tacit endorsement of children taking on adult responsibilities had evolved into something ghastly.

When your whole world was at stake, finding somebody who could get the job done became all that mattered. Heroes. Villains. Those were really just arbitrary labels in the face of that need. It was hard to argue with the logic.

He'd even been persuaded by it himself, before.

But it was another thing to see it play out under the stars in the ruins of Brockton Bay, to watch as a Ward straddled a supervillain and gloated about cutting the other girl's throat.

This was happening _in America._

If this was what being a hero meant nowadays...

Well, too late for second guesses.

"Guess I don't need to worry about the villain who saw my face, now," said Shadow Stalker, as she shifted solid in his crosshairs.

(Years too late.)

A single shot took off the top of the girl's head.

The Ward's twitching body toppled over into the shallow pool of water, the blood and splatted brain matter lost in the nighttime gloom. Skitter just stared in shock for one second, two seconds—

Unnatural darkness flooded the street.

He sighed, and his red helmet's sensors dug through the spectrum for some opening, but Grue's shaker power was impressive in terms of the coverage it provided.

"I'm not going to shoot anyone else," he announced to the upstart gangsters hidden down below, lowering his rifle. "Nice ambush, by the way. I'm guessing Skitter's costume is knife-proof? Or was playing the worm on the hook the price of re-entry?"

The darkness dissolved.

There were only two Undersiders in sight, Skitter and Tattletale. The others skulked in the shadows. As if his helmet's sensors couldn't pin down their heat signatures on infrared, couldn't passively echolocate them by the sound of their breathing and their heartbeat.

Children.

But then, Shadow Stalker had been a child too.

Tattletale folded her arms across her chest. "Got a name?"

He tapped his helmet. "Call me the Red Hood."

"For someone trying to save a fellow villain, Red, you just made a whole mess of problems for Skitter."

"And of Sophia Hess!" he replied with fake cheerfulness.

Tattletale kept cool, but Skitter visibly startled at the namedrop. Even her gathering swarms froze up for a second.

He shrugged. "Your pal's already a mess. First she's a mole, then she's flipped, _then_ she's backstabbed by Armsmaster after playing the hero, and now she's scampered back to her old friends? Remarkably poor life decisions, but I guess Coil's money is too tempting. Your stranger should also back off before I kneecap her."

To his rear, the person his red helmet's rear-view cameras insisted was there stopped mid-step.

Tattletale got an unbecoming smile on her face. "But not you. This time you're taking the lone wolf—"

He raised his bolt-action rifle again. Sometimes the old ways were the best ways, especially with Shatterbird in town. "You're gonna keep your mouth shut, or I'll put you down in that puddle with Shadow Stalker."

Thinkers. You spoon-fed them tidbits of data, and they went wild with insinuations and extrapolations.

Not that she was entirely wrong.

"It's such a shame," he said. "You six have all this power and all you do with it is run errands for a wannabe Bond villain. At least until you topple him and steal the crown for yourselves. Am I right?" Without waiting for a response, he added, "Of course I am, because that's the way the game is played."

Skitter had finally found her voice by this point. "At least we don't kill people."

Eerie. She'd said that the same way Alexandria once had. "Oh hey up there on the moral high ground! How's the view? I hope your boots didn't get too dirty on all the faces you stepped on to get up top."

"Why shoot her? No. Wrong question. Why save me?"

Because Sophia Hess was an insult to the spirit of the Wards.

Because little Colin Wallis had grown up to be an awful man, who'd tried to murder a girl who could have been saved.

Because, like her, he'd tried and failed at being a hero once himself.

"Lots of reasons," the Red Hood said. "Mostly? The PRT will be gunning for all of you, now. Even with the Slaughterhouse in town, hero-killers are too radioactive to work a truce with, meaning I get their bounties all to myself."

Especially the Siberian's.

Skitter all but said "Gulp." Even her thinker friend went pale.

"The... Slaughterhouse Nine is here?" Skitter asked.

"Yeah. Don't believe me? Check out the three triple homicides the PRT picked up this morning. The Travelers called one batch in. So if you value your lives, get the hell out of town before the curtain goes up."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"You can't hunt them," Skitter said. "Even the Triumvirate doesn't try."

Yeah. There was a reason for that, and it had nothing to do with their own fear. Especially when it came to the obscenity of Doctor Manton still being alive.

"Kid," the man who had once been Hero declared, "death itself couldn't stop me."


	5. Lady Luck

"Why... why did you wait?" Emma asked. "You saw me in trouble, but you didn't do a thing."

"Because I put my coin in the wrong pocket and I was digging around for it."

"You what?"

Rather than explain in words, the girl in the black-and-white cloak simply held up a silver dollar. One side had been polished to mirror-like shine. The other was scorched black, as if it had been plucked from the heart of a fire.

Emma suspected that the other girl's implication would have had her spitting curses, before. She had left her and her father's fates up to simple coin toss. Now? It didn't make sense, but then nothing did in her life anymore. "Why?"

"You ever just stop and watch people on the street, going about their day? Imagine if the air raid sirens went off. Their precious little worlds would implode—because they'd be _surprised_. As if the chaos of life could be managed. Sticking your hands in your coat might ward off a pickpocket, but what about lung cancer? Or Jack Slash? Or a million other little things that can turn your life upside down."

The girl in the cloak flipped her coin.

"Heads."

She flipped it again.

"Heads."

Again.

"Tails."

The other girl kept at it, flipping her coin but not speaking.

Emma's mouth went dry. To her back, she heard the sound of cars driving past the entrance to this one-way side road, and fragments of casual conversation from faceless strangers going about their day. She and this girl, this cape, might as well have been on another world as far as any of those people realized.

How often, Emma wondered, had she gone about her own day, never realizing the enormity of everything around her? The threats and giants brushing shoulders with her as they passed by?

"I don't do the partners thing," the other girl said, "or the team thing."

"Did you flip a coin over that?"

"Yes."

Emma nodded.

The other girl tucked her coin into a pocket on her two-toned vest. "It's a philosophy, a way of looking at it all. You can look at the world as a… what's the word? One thing and another?"

"A binary?"

"A binary thing. Black and white. One man is born a hero, his brother a coward. Holy men are martyred, and junkies grow legion. Why? Luck. That's all. Nothing special." The other girl smirked, as if sharing a joke. Maybe she was. "On this violent and brutish little planet of ours, it's the unlucky ones who wind up face down."

 

* * *

 

"I love the haircut," Taylor filled the silence, babbling as a smile stretched across her face. "You manage to make any style look great."

Emma closed her eyes. She could feel Sophia staring at her, wondering how the hell she got along with a teenager who looked like she was still nine years old. Because embracing the inherent chaos of the universe didn't mean you couldn't have personal opinions about other people.

Or maybe she had just flipped a coin.

Emma had.

And she'd come outside knowing what to do about Taylor.

She stepped down one stair to get closer to Taylor, put a hand on her shoulder. Taylor raised one arm to wrap Emma in a hug, and Emma—


	6. Hell's Crucible

**2001.**

"—the _hell_ is that?"

Thomas Calvert looked up from the avalanche of triplicate forms he was digging himself out of. Barreling down on him was a fellow PRT squad captain— _C. Allen_ by the name tag—in full battle uniform to his own plain clothes. Thomas bet his hospital roommate didn't have to deal with this sort of thing in Brockton Bay, but then shooting his immediate superior meant he hadn't merited being kicked that far upstairs.

"What's your name?" the trooper demanded.

"Calvert," he said, not bothering to stop clicking his pen as his eyes met the other man's faceless mask. "I'm the new head of Squad Three."

The tone of Squad One's captain soften somewhat, shifting from angry to simply strident. "First day, huh? Figures. Well, I don't know how they let you through the lobby with that thing, but I'm going to have to confiscate it for building safety."

He pointed at the cardboard crate sitting on the security desk's countertop. It was filled with nicknacks from Thomas' last posting, before the PRT had punished him for his pragmatism at Ellisburg with this delightful promotion. Still, it beat the jail time he'd expected. Once again, however, his expectations were jarred. Thomas' counterpart was upset about his potted Peace Lily.

"Relax. It's plastic. I read the regulations."

"I don't care if it's gold-plated. It shouldn't be in the building."

"Jesus," muttered one of the officers flanking Calvert's counterpart in Squad One. "Fucking new guys..."

Thomas made a point of memorizing that officer's name tag. He then added, "I wasn't aware there was also a rule against—"

"Calvert," Capt. Allen said, almost sighing his name, "you're new here, but if you're going to survive for long you need to develop a healthy sense of paranoia. Don't count on regulations or unwritten rules to save you."

"Of course." Thomas handed over the potted plant. "I'll bow to your expertise on this matter."

Allen passed off the plant to one of his subordinates. "Get this down to the incinerator. Kelly, go with. See you in ten." He turned back to Calvert, who was working hard at keeping from raising an eyebrow. "FYI—the boss doesn't like that sort of political talk. He's old school."

With that, Squad One headed upstairs.

It took Thomas another half hour to cut through the remainder of his red tape, the price for a sudden transfer. He took his cardboard box and headed for the elevator. Another guard had to buzz him through a checkpoint gate there. The doors opened with a ping to reveal his new supervisor. Thomas hastily tucked his box under one arm to free himself up for a salute.

"Director Gordon, sir! Captain Thomas Calvert reporting for duty!"

The mustached man waved dismissively in his direction. "At ease, Calvert. This isn't a military base."

 _Could've fooled me,_ he thought.

"Get in."

Heart pounding just a little, Calvert strode inside the elevator. Director James Gordon was the first PRT officer he'd seen without armor since entering the building. Even the secretaries in the lobby had been packing heat. Gordon didn't go without. He had a holster under his trench coat, and probably one or two more elsewhere that Thomas hadn't spotted yet, but little else. Swap out his PRT badge for a GCPD one, and he could've passed for a cop. But then, he used to be one, didn't he? 

"You picked a hell of a day to start," Gordon said. "Some damn fool with an itchy trigger finger shot and killed the Joker yesterday, and now the whole city is holding its breath."

"He hasn't resurrected yet?"

Director Gordon glanced over his shoulder, met Thomas' eye, and then turned his focus back to the elevator door.

"No," Gordon said, "but he always comes back, and God knows in what mood this time. One incarnation he's trying to patent smiling fish, and the next he's cutting off his own face and strapping it back on with belts, or dehydrating the UN Security Council to dust."

 _Try spending five minutes dealing Nilbog,_ he thought.

"You're not a native, son, so I'm going to give you some advice. Gotham's rules are different from other cities." 

Feeling a splash of casualness might work on his new boss, Thomas tried for some levity. "Vegas on PCP is how I've heard it put."

Gordon 'hurrumphed', but he chalked that up as a victory. The man didn't seem the laughing type. "The mob's hold was never broken here. The Feds could never get enough dirt for convictions. When parahumans first started turning up, they were directly incorporated into the old crime families. By the time they finally pushed themselves into leadership, they'd become entrenched in the system.

"Rank-and-file henchmen are the silent majority in Gotham's underworld. Villains keep territory because they can provide their followers with respect, money, and protection. Anyone tries to talk and—" Director Gordon drew a finger across his own neck. "Same thing for anybody who tries to overturn the apple cart. Ever hear about Doctor Double X?"

Thomas hadn't.

The elevator pinged. They walked out into a long hallway with a checkerboard floor. There were turrets mounted all along the ceiling.

"He was a high-level master from Los Angeles," the Director explained. "Had the ability to project a sapient duplicate with high blaster and brute levels, plus a flight ability. He'd even gone toe-to-toe with Alexandria a few times. Never won, but I'm told the Doc made a good show of it. Well, LA got too hot for him, so he decided to try his luck in Gotham. Probably thought it was virgin territory. Only an Alexandria Package like him thought he was above having normal mooks. He wanted parahumans only, and did the protection racket stuff himself instead of farming out the duties. Then he decided to make a splashy public debut by rampaging across the Narrows and trashing the Iceberg Lounge in broad daylight."

Thomas Calvert thought of his plastic peace lily, now incinerated out of Captain Cyprus Allen's paranoia. "What happened to him?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"His wife and unborn baby wasn't so lucky," Gordon said. "Not that he realized that at first. Clayface... well. Look up the case file sometime. Although you should know, Professor Pyg isn't easy reading on a full stomach."

"They went after _his family?"_

"If families were off-limit in Gotham, my daughter wouldn't be spending the rest of her life in a wheelchair." Gordon stopped them at the entrance to what Calvert guessed was the PRT trooper bullpen. A dozen or so officers milled around. All in armor. Only a few had their helmets off. "I'll let you get settled in. There's a staff meeting at 4:30."

With that, Gordon walked off.

Thomas looked around, and finally approached a tall blonde with her hair in a bob, who didn't look too busy leaning against a corner desk and drinking coffee. Thomas finally caught a break thanks to the name on her badge. It'd been in his briefing at the hospital.

"Lt. Mulcahey?" he said. "I'm Thomas Calvert, your new CO."

She swapped her mug to her free hand and offered him a welcome. "Must've seen some serious shit in Vermont, sir."

"Not officially, no."

Rebecca Mulcahey smiled slyly. "I read you. Lemme show you your desk." She stepped away from the one she was leaning on. Thomas hadn't given it a second glance, given the thing was still covered in personal effects. "Here you go."

Thomas hesitated.

"Once you've settled in, somebody will be by to get Cavallo's stuff together for the auction."

"Auction?" he asked. "Won't his family want it?"

"Cavallo's wife already took most everything when she divorced him, and Internal Affairs seized the rest."

Wonderful. He was replacing a trooper dumb enough to get caught on the take. "So it's for his defense fund."

She pointed up.

Thomas Calvert's eyes followed her finger, toward the ceiling, and the bullet hole in it. There was a fresh patch of white paint that clashed glaringly with the rest of the ceiling. Although whoever covered up the bloodstain had missed a few flecks of dried brown blood here and there.

It still smelled fresh. The paint, that is.

 _Ah,_ he realized. _Funeral expenses._

Mulcahey clapped him on the shoulder. "Welcome to Gotham City."


End file.
